August 2, 1999

Jon Marvel, Hailey, Idaho, architect, founded the Idaho Watersheds Project to target public-lands grazing, but his notoriously in-your-face, confrontational style has roused a lot of controversy along the way.

Feature

Jon Marvel, Hailey, Idaho, architect, founded the Idaho
Watersheds Project to target public-lands grazing, but his
notoriously in-your-face, confrontational style has roused a lot of
controversy along the way.

News

Colorado's congressional delegation calls for a get-tough
policy toward real estate developer Tom Chapman after a billboard
advertising lots for sale appears on the boundary of the Black
Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument.

A plan to avoid listing the westslope cutthroat trout as
an endangered species would poison a stream to kill all its
non-native fish; Cherry Creek runs across Ted Turner's Montana
ranch, but opposition to it and Turner, who favors the plan, has
arisen.

Perspective

The Montana Legislature ratifies a water compact with the
Crow Indian Tribe that favors consumptive users of the water at the
expense of the Bighorn River itself, and of the world-class trout
fishery in Bighorn Lake.

The Takings Project and its mastermind, law professor
Richard Epstein, are trying to put a stop to any federal or state
regulation of business and property, and despite their flawed
reasoning, many conservative judges are under their
influence.

Opinion

Modern-day "robber barons" such as Tom Chapman will
continue to blackmail taxpayers by threatening to develop
wilderness and park inholdings - unless land-management agencies
summon the will to fight back.